What everyone is missing about trademarks

If you don't "aggressively" defend it you don't own it.  I learned this when developing restaurant concepts. Trade dress is defineable and defensible, and if you overlook anyone taking too much "inspiration" from your trade dress, you can't do anything about someone else looking like your website, or signage, or packaging, or layout.

The highly educated techno- geeks get all pissy when Apple vigorously prosecutes any infringement. But if Apple doesn't, they relinquish their rights to the brand.  That is why any big brand has an army of lawyers scouring for even imagined incursions. Disney is famous for it. So is Coke, and clothing designers, publishers, movie studios, etc.

If you want to be sure you aren't drinking brown carbonated piss in Chang Mai, you are happy about that.  Counterfeiting is simply the more egregious end of the spectrum that starts with trade dress. Trade dress is what companies hire architects, graphic designers, web designers, consultants, engineers and all manner of people who don't want their work ripped off, to build.

So is Apple being mean to Samsung? No, they are drawing a line to discourage others, and telling the international courts "You damn betcha we have always staunchly defended out patents!"

Now that we all are brands, we should know a bit more about the implications. If you happen to have a twitter handle, say, MiniMouse, expect a Disney letter to show up someday, or should I say expect Twitter to kill your account.  If you do due diligence, establish an identity that is unique, then see it shamelessly copied and do nothing about it, simply move on to developing a new one, because you have lost the old one.

Of course, if the whole issue between Samsung and Apple could be argued out on Twitter, we really wouldn't require trademark protection law, would we?  Once that simple example is understood, the rest is less hard to fathom.

boyd | apophenia » A Customer Service Nightmare: Resolving Trademark and Personal Reputation in a Limited Name Space
Read it online: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2011/04/28/a-customer-service-nightmare-resolving-trademark-and-personal-reputation-in-a-limited-name-space.html
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Tough Questions for RIM

In Forbes, Eric Jackson wrote about the growing fiasco at RIM. His approach? A few pointed questions to the CEO. Errr, one of the CEOs. Since both seem loony, I suppose it doesn't matter which one.

Why am I so focused on RIM's business?  As a former loyal user, I felt my investment in their products and time spent learning them was wasted. As well, when a business is dominant and fails to innovate it pisses ms off. I have seen it up close and it costs customers, investors and employees.   

Tough Questions for RIM

Daring Fireball

Eric Jackson:

After Research in Motion's cut earnings guidance last night, many investors are scratching their heads. Here is what I'd ask co-CEO Jim Balsillie if I met him for coffee this morning.

Jackson's questions are clear and pointed. I think RIM is a company whose business is on the cusp of imploding.

 ★ 

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In other news apps...

Another source I browse daily is the Bloomberg app. It is a good financial news source, with more in depth and less biased reporting on all news relating to business. That is to say, all news.

But I wanted to tweet an article today about people making filthy luchre from not caring about the Wedding. Lo and behold, all you can do with Bloomberg articles is email them. And no Instapaper! Drat! If I gotta read it now, I have to plan time to browse a resource. As you might imagine, I then use it less.

Still, the quality of reporting is sterling.


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Forbes on Apple's fix of location tracking

Proving that it is as good as any tabloid at smarmy and biased blogging, Forbes duly covered Apple's response to the not so new revelation that the iPhone knows where you have been, sorta.

The writer seems to have a personal axe to grind here, and being a blog, that's OK, but for Pete's sake, own up to that.

I am not surprised by the level of hysteria on this topic, it seems so sinister to have your phone saving location data. And I think calling the cause a"bug" is disingenuous. To me, a bug is when software fails to function right. This seems to me to be better classified as a "screw up". After all, someone wrote code to do this with a very specific purpose, and accomplished that. But no one on the team or in a position of approval thought to ask what happens to that information.

Now I wonder if anyone in the outraged press will dare to investigate the kind of data other phones keep?

Apple blames 'bug' for iPhone location tracking http://bit.ly/ekR2TA

Read it online: http://twitter.com/Forbes/status/63246710691991552

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Instacast podcast re-caster

I first heard of this app a few weeks ago, and could not understand how it would benefit me, despite glowing reviews.




I finally downloaded it to see for myself. The reason I was even interested is that I was getting sick of having to sync my iPhone continually to get the latest podcast to which I subscribe.

Using Instacast is not as easy as it was reputed to be. The writers on tech blogs who think it is may have lost touch. Of course, they are the people whose pocasts I listen to, and so they are immersed in a semi sound engineer reality.

I stuck with it, and found the nugget. I like firing up Instacast, and while I listen, seeing Podcasts update themselves. Now that's the way it oughta be!

If only the interface would get streamlined. But in any case, if you like Podcasts on your iPhone, or want to, use this app, it is worth it.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Instacast podcast recaster

I read about this app a few weeks ago.  I was dubious about it's benefits, despite the glowing reviews. After all, didn't Steve tell us the iPhone is the best iPod ever made?  Yes, he did. 

I kept reading about Instacast, because the bloggers I read on a regular basis kept touting it. Either they were bought, or there was something magical in the app. I respect these people, so on their reco, I went ahead and invested a couple of minutes and some of my iPhone memory to download it. 

I am still a bit baffled by the interface. I don't think it is really better than the iPhone's iPod. But, it is magic. What it does that the Steve would not allow iOS to do, is to actually load up new podcasts without Having to sync to iTunes. 

If you are an occasional user of Podcasts, loading them up on sync is not a bad thing. In fact, it keeps you backed up and synced up. I was beginning to find this  limitation annoying though. I listen to several Podcasts, and I was finding myself syncing everyday, or more often. That is just mad. 

With Instacast, once I subscribe to a podcast, I get the updates either when I launch the app, or if it is already running, whenever the podcaster posts a new on. The way it should be. Even if, Steve Forbid, I subscribe to a pod sat without using iTunes, via an author's RSS feed and site. 

So I became a believer in Instacast. A good tool. 

The Beauty of (Mostly) Apple-Free Podcast Consumption
http://nerdgap.com/the-beauty-of-mostly-apple-free-podcast-consumption/

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The Beauty of (Mostly) Apple-Free Podcast Consumption

by Brett Kelly

Let me begin by saying that I'm an Apple guy. I use Apple computers pretty much exclusively. I have an iPhone and an iPad, both of which I love and use like crazy. I don't doubt that many of you fine people reading this would probably fall into a similar category, but I wanted to make my stance and perspective clear before continuing. Mmkay? Mmkay.

I love me some podcasts. Before I started working at home, podcasts were what made my 40-minute commute bearable. The iPhone — my primary audio playback device that isn't an actual computer — has the ability to play podcasts (obviously) and, when synced with iTunes, I was always up to date with the latest episodes of my favorite shows. It was a pretty slick little setup that many of you probably also utilize for your podcasting needs, and one that I made use of for several years. That is, until, I started to find a few little annoyances. The two that irked me the most are:

1. The inability to subscribe to and update individual podcasts independently of iTunes
2. Having to wait for iTunes to refresh its podcast feeds for new episodes to show up (even though they'd been released before — many hours before, in some cases).

I have a few shows that I never ever miss and, to the extent I can help it, will begin listening to immediately after they're released. This is when my second point above became a serious annoyance. A podcaster would announce that he/she'd published a new episode on Twitter and I would, periodically over the next several hours, visit the podcast in iTunes on my iPhone to see if the new episode were available. The thing is, once the podcaster publishes the episode, you can download it immediately — unless you're waiting on iTunes' molasses-laden ass to update. This is absolutely a first-world, spoiled-white-guy problem, but it bugged me nonetheless. Until I found Instacast.

Instacast is a self-contained podcast consumption tool for the iPhone. It allows you to manage your subscriptions to podcasts and play back episodes (audio and video) without ever having to dance with iTunes. It also allows you to subscribe directly to the RSS feed that powers the podcast, which means that new episodes are available as soon as the podcaster puts them up on the web. It does all of this with a really spiffy UI and it's very actively developed; new features are built and released regularly and they're very attentive to customer feedback. I'd venture to say that this is one of my top 5 iPhone apps *ever*. It's that good.

Being a Man about Internet, I will also come across random audio files that I'd like to listen to. If the producer offered these files as downloads (as opposed to displaying a flash-based video player on their Web site), my previous workflow was to download them to my Dropbox on my Mac, wait for them to be uploaded to Dropbox's servers, then download the audio in the Dropbox app on my iPhone (by marking it as a "favorite"). After that, I'd be ready to listen to it, but the audio player in Dropbox doesn't remember where I stopped listening to a long piece of audio, so I'd be forced to either scrawl down the minute I stopped listening or take a screenshot of the Dropbox player. If this sounds like an incredibly janky process, that's because it really is (this isn't a knock against Dropbox, by the way — their audio player is just fine and my whining here isn't about their product).

Enter Huffduffer, a web site that will create a podcast for you from the random bits of audio you find around the web. If I, say, come across a particularly interesting recording of Martha Stewart doing her best Gilbert Gottfried impression, chances are I'm not going to want to go to the trouble of subscribing to the Martha Stewart Impressions podcast just to hear that one episode. So, I browse directly to the episode's web page and click "huffduff it" in my browser's bookmark bar. Fill out a few fields and it's been added to my Huffduffer podcast which, incidentally, is one of my subscriptions within Instacast. From there, I can listen to it in a bonafide podcast player (which remembers where I stop it) along with all of my other "real" podcasts.

With the discovery of these two tools, I've been able to completely eliminate all of the finicky parts of my podcast-listening process (including iTunes) and the whole kit-n-kaboodle set me back a grand total of two dollars and about 30 minutes of setup time.

Some recommended podcasts, since we're talking about it and everything:

Image courtesy of Colleen AF Venable

 

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